Our “Google caught, denies involvement” from last week about cybercriminals utilizing Google services brought quite a few responses. This one definitely knows the story, and we though should be passed along…
Reader Feedback:
UGNN reader J.H. from Ithaca, NY writes:
Concerning splogs at Blogger/Blogspot, I’ve simply bookmarked the appropriate webpage. From this page help.blogger.com (note it does not require Blogger login) click “report TOS violation” and then click “spam” and it will give you a field to enter the splog’s URL.
They also have a phish-reporting page.
Search Blogger/blogspot and you will find a couple of blogs by anti-spam experts who are very critical of Google’s unresponsiveness to the spam problem. They have the best advice on reporting splogs effectively.
My biggest beef with Google’s spam tolerance is that their free email service, gmail, is the service of choice of forum spambots. I run a small Mac-related forum which gets its share of spambot registrations. While I can block registrations from some regional or minor free email providers (e.g. gawab.com) I dare not block registrations from gmail since so many legitimate registrants use their service.
Google could easily detect the use of a gmail account for forum-spamming. Google could simply tally up how many incoming emails contain the word encrypted (or crypté, or whatever the word is in other phpbb language packs) and flag the account for review after the tally accumulates to a certain number within a certain time. (For a spambot, it could amount to hundreds within a few minutes) Few phpbb forum admins bother changing the wording of their confirmation email, so it’s an excellent diagnostic. Google could also look for the row of dashes before and after the username/password section. Or they could look for “welcome” and “forums” in the email titles in the account’s in-box. Then the account could be deleted or at least placed on hold.
Certainly this type of processing would not be a privacy violation for legitimate users if only a machine is looking at the email. And gmail ALREADY scans emails, despite the processing costs, in order to select the targeted ads they display with each message.
I have sent these suggestions to them repeatedly but always get back a canned answer which has nothing to do with the issue.
Google could do a lot more to fight spam on their system, but they’d have to invest some labor and money in it. They don’t think it’s their problem, so they are not interested in being part of the solution.
Seems to me that their bottom line profits have trumped their motto “Don’t be evil”.
As Edmund Burke said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Hope you’re having a great day too. 
Excellent piece… excellent! Our sincere thanks go out to J.H who took the time to write when discovering the comment box turned off at that posting.
Folks, you are invited to comment on ANY posting here. However, we’ve started turning OFF the commenting because of comment spammers whose spam robots post hundreds of spam entries a week.
Spammers are ruining the web, and few people are taking the effort to do anything about it.
